《The Digital Psycho Apocalypse》 Prologue I have long mused what to call this cataclysm that shook the very foundations of our society. Many scholars have had different names for it. The War on Bytes. The Electronic Argy-Bargy. The Great Scrap. I prefer to hold up the naked truth to the sunlight and call it The Digital Psycho Apocalypse simply because it was indeed brought on by a horde of criminally insane people and in more ways than one, an apocalypse. The world has been greatly restructured in the past few months even though the fabric of society is changed, for the better in my opinion. Everyday I walk out of my house and travel for half a kilometer to reach the grocery store, whose owner smiles happily at me and all the other customers milling about his fresh produce. Then I walk back, or if the bullet wound hurts too much I rent a horse. Bicycles are too costly these days, most having been requisitioned by the armed forces and militias. The air is crisper and cooler. Trees have made a comeback. Rows of gigantic elms and shorter mango and guava flank the many roads and avenues of my hometown, beneath which sit families chatting, joking, munching on cookies and sandwiches. Even the sky looks a shade of blue deeper than usual. It is not all pristine though. Rehabilitation clinics with dormitories attached have sprung up all across the country, across the world if news is to be believed. They are filled with teenagers and young adults who formed the bulk of the internet crowd even back then, mildly peppered with some middle aged men and women that got into the tenacious world of social media to ward off loneliness and found themselves in a quagmire not soon after. Sometimes I visit them to gather tidbits for my book. The piteous wails of people begging for a smartphone to shoot a TikTok video turns my heart. Psychiatry is suddenly more popular than it ever was. Armed guards stand near cells where the addicts, christened kromeheads after a popular cyberpunk webseries, are recovering. Too much blood stains recent history to show them even the slightest leniency. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. In the end, I guess the root lies in human ambition and insecurity. The social media giants did not care for the havoc they were wreaking upon nature as long as the cash rolled in. The gullible consumers did not care about how they were being programmed to become helpless, dependent on the digital drug served at a moment''s fancy as long as the likes and shares kept pouring. Imagine, if you will, a shining new abattoir with hundreds of sheep standing in the stalls, bleating feebly as relaxants are pumped into them and mechanical knives close in for the kill. That was social media in the old world. But I digress. This is to be a full and extensive chronicle of the conflict from as many perspectives as I could gather, and it cannot be started in media res. Let me tell you how it began. One cheery morning five years ago, a thirteen year old girl in Seoul ripped out her best friend''s intestines because she insulted her favorite K-pop band. Seoul, July Park Chae-Yeong runs her family restaurant with all the flourish of one who has been in the business of fried chicken and bibimbap for a long time. She meets me in the half empty dining hall after rush hour, brushing strips of hair away from her tired, sweaty face. All around us the city settles down as lights blink on in apartments and condominiums. It takes Chae-Yeong a few minutes to believe my story of gathering materials for an officially sanctioned book. The war has left many paranoid.
I was a teacher back then. Godeung hakgyo, what you will probably call high school in English. My job was to hammer the basics of human anatomy and sexual reproduction into students who were clearly bored and wanted to go home, or smoke weed behind the premises, or just laze around. It may be hard to believe now, but I did not want to give in to my father''s nagging and take up the family tradition. For me, an independent life away from the hustle bustle of business was very important. And the pay was good, so who the hell was I to complain? About Jeong, I would like to go on record right now and tell you that she was the sweetest, most considerate girl I have ever met in my life. Her parents were both cashiers at Kookmin Bank which allowed them to enroll their daughter at a top notch private school. Quiet and shy at first. I remember someone stuck a rose and a love letter under her desk once and she blushed after every ten minutes for the rest of the day. Good in studies. Averse to smoking and drinking unlike many of her classmates. You can say she was the ideal student. The only weakness Jeong ever displayed was her love for K-pop. Now, people all across the world listened to our songs in those days, even more than native Koreans if some old timers are to be believed. But she was obsessed with them, especially the group GTS. When she was not buried in a book of Physics or Shakespeare she would be sitting with her back against a tree, headphones plugged into her phone and music playing on a loop. Friends, teachers, fights, stray dogs, street vendors all ceased to affect her in that moment. Even if a war broke out in front of her Jeong would not have noticed. In later days the police scraped her laptop and found a 102 GB folder crammed with the pictures of all the seven members of GTS in various concerts, charity functions, cafes, burger joints and airports. Screenshots of news articles which merely mentioned them in passing had been organized so carefully, a librarian would curl up in jealousy and die. Deeper search revealed more disturbing things. You have probably heard of it by now. Deepfakes of the lead singer Joon buck naked, covered in tattoos, getting sucked by a hot stripped whose face, quite understandably, had been swapped with Jeong''s in an erotic fantasy. Yeah, that is what obsession with a pop icon does to people. The much touted and analyzed incident happened in the school canteen, so I had a first rate view. But I must tell you about the fight one day prior. You see, Katie was the exact opposite of Jeong but the both of them always stuck together. Like melted chocolate and wrapper. Jeong would help her with homework and Katie would introduce her to the hottest boys in the city in turn. It was a fair exchange and it worked, until the moment Katie turned up her nose and declared GTS a cheap knockoff of her favorite band, The Topknots. This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. Chae-Yeong looks sad. I have never seen such a catfight before. By the time three of us teachers got to the classroom, both the girls had torn each others'' uniforms and scratched their faces bloody. Jeong was screeching like a whole forest of owls and sobbing at the same time while Katie simply looked a mixture of dazed and hostile. The Principal summoned the parents. Both were given a nasty earful each and suspended for three days. I thought that was the end of it. Everyone thought that was the end of it. Nobody saw Jeong for a whole week. She did not answer texts or calls, there were no Facebook updates, not even a ping in the cyberspace that would help us contact her. Most people thought she had taken the scrap to heart and needed some time off. I dismissed the case entirely. This is one of the biggest cities in the world and a nerve center of pop culture. Teenagers get unruly all the time in Seoul. After seven days, I was in the canteen to grab a quick lunch before my next class. A sudden commotion made me turn around and there she was. Jeong, looking like she had not slept for years. Her hair was disheveled and her eyes were blank. She just stood there in front of Katie''s table like a shop mannequin. A small crowd was beginning to gather. People stopped to stare, some took out their phones to record what was evidently about to become either a reunion or another installment in the drama. It happened in a blur. One moment Jeong was standing still, the next her arm was rising and falling like a piston. Katie shrieked as if her soul was being sucked out. Blood spattered the chairs and the onlookers. Oh god, there was so much blood. She stumbled and fell and Jeong fell on top her still stabbing in mechanical rhythm. The canteen descended into pandemonium. Students fled helter-skelter back to their classes or took to the streets. The guards were overwhelmed and could not stop the tide. Some teachers remained in the vicinity but dared not approach the girl who had suddenly turned into a maniacal killer. I was the only one inside the building and I watched the murder in graphic detail. My food, just like my blood, ran cold after the first three minutes. When Jeong was satisfied that she had killed her friend, she slit open Katie''s belly with the cleaver and pushed one hand in. It emerged with slippery pink tubes. I think that is when my breakfast rushed out of my mouth in a mess. We sit in silence for a long time. A family comes in, husband, wife and two little kids. Chae-Yeong nods and smiles at them, and I realize my interview is at an end. I thank her for her time and get up to leave. Many people remember many things from that day, she tells me while holding the door open, and most of it is bullshit cultivated in conspiracy theory groups over the years. All I can see on some nights when I close my eyes is a sweet young girl standing over the disemboweled corpse of another girl, bloody cleaver in hand and not a flicker of emotion on her face. London, August
Doctor Hector Bronson is a large man with a larger smile. He welcomes me to his house-cum-office with great delight, expressing his joy at the fact that someone has decided to write about the bleak chain of events after all. Cards, dried roses, chocolates and books litter the chamber he directs me to. Gifts from patients both former and recent. A cat glares disapprovingly at me from a rug in the corner. Doctor Bronson comes in whistling a merry tune and settles his bulk in an armchair, fixing me with mischievous eyes. He does not look like a man who dealt with some of the worst and ultra violent cases of the pandemic.
I had just landed at Heathrow when the cellphone beeped shrilly. I didn''t pick it up, anticipating another lecture on revolutionary new medicine for Schizoid Personality Disorder. Believe you me, between the terminal and gates my phone died and came alive fifteen times. Fifteen! I finally picked it out of my coat ready to shower the caller with abuse. It was Healey. A smart man, you would have like him. Could make the rocks laugh with his ribald jokes.
Healey sounded impatient. Scared even. He said a new patient had just come in from Broadmoor and he suffered from an illness that was not on any book or historical record. The Americans had been contacted and they were clueless. He asked me, nay
I recall thinking to myself, bloody hell this might be shot at winning the Nobel at last. Just kidding. New, unique illnesses intrigued me like nothing else. The world is ever changing and the mind struggles beneath the weight of changed realities all the time, which in turn provides for some rather interesting cases. I hailed a cab and clambered into it with my suitcase and duffel bag. Told him to take me straight to Bedlam.
The hospital was in uproar when I arrived. Orderlies rushed about waving straitjackets or accompanied other patients who had been let out for a bit of strolling back to their rooms. Healey stood at the very entrance. He relieved me of my luggage and ushered me in inside, straight to the Psych Unit and down to the subterranean level where the most unstable patients are kept in secure isolation. There, I stood before a screen of polycarbonate and watched an extraordinary young man go through the stages of a disease not known to man.
He was twenty one, blonde, of an athletic build and a fresher at some software engineering startup. An achiever by all means. His name was Luke Forester. For twenty five minutes he bared his teeth and widened his eyes at me like a ghoul while repeating again and again that he needed to go back to his waifu and kill the goblins who had attacked his village. Then he suddenly went stiff for five minutes, then started again about how immigrants from Middle Eastern countries were fertile ground for lone wolf terrorism and should be ousted with immediate effect. Another five minutes later he was regaling us with jokes that would never pass muster in civilized society. Then he went still and blank, like a TV turning off, and went back to bed.
Healey and Sabitha Roy, another specialist who assisted me from time to time, informed me that he had been going on like this for the past three days. His coworkers initially thought he had overdosed on LSD or some cocktail of drugs and was having a bad, extended trip but that was not the case. That morning he got into a fight with his boss and nearly stabbed the man in the eye with a fountain pen. Cops were called and he was taken to the nearest hospital, where it was determined that he did not have any hallucinogen or other recreational drug in his system. The resident psychiatrist, baffled out of her mind, referred Luke to Bedlam.
At first I thought it was a severe psychotic break. You must understand, my brain still worked to assign a "normal" category to the phenomenon. We dosed him with clonazepam for the first week. It had no use. He slept longer hours but started his inane blabbering as soon as he had eaten breakfast. Then I scheduled some counseling sessions personally where Luke told me he was actually the
Risperidone had the same effect. He simply grew more violent and began banging on the doors and windows at odd hours. Refused to eat or drink. Did not sleep for two full days. His blood pressure spiked and crashed at regular intervals until I decided to stop medication altogether. A CT scan was ordered on urgent basis.
That shed a lot of light on Luke''s condition. What was immediately noticeable was that he had an abnormally enlarged amygdala. There were several inflammations on his hypothalamus and the cerebrum had shrunk considerably. It confused the hell out of me. What manner of a disease was this? Not epilepsy, which would have explained the amygdala. Cerebral atrophy? No. This was something else. Something big.
I put all my work on hold on work and started dealing with the Luke Forester case bit by bit, trying to make sense of his banter and brain. But as you might know if you have read the interview I gave to BBC, all of a sudden a flurry of cases started cropping all over the bloody United Kingdom. Birmingham, London, Leicestershire, Hereford. Dublin. Cardiff. Mate, they all displayed the same symptoms of coherent but inexplicable speech, aggression, behavior resembling extreme drug withdrawal. As if mass hysteria had suddenly gripped the nation.
It was in the middle of September that it occurred to me in a flash. It was a Facebook post written by a sociologist I think. Here I was, sipping tea and fiddling with my laptop by a crackling fire and my eyes fall upon this beautifully written column which predicted a time of great intellectual retardation caused by overexposure to social media and normalization of things that should not be normalized. It got me thinking. Perhaps Luke Forester had fallen prey to this retardation and his mind had snapped. The same goes for all the other patients filling the psychiatric wards elsewhere. It was the germ of a possibility and would require more study, more research.
But we ran out of time before that. Less than a month after Luke came to us, Bedlam was visited by a team of very official looking men and women. They just rolled into the premises one day in pitch black sedans with tinted windows, all dressed in crisp suits and dark sunglasses. Bluetooth earpieces stuck in their ears like slugs. Two of them had HK45 Tacticals strapped to their chests. My cousin is in the army so I know a bit about guns, and those meant serious business.
The leader of the little group shoved an official looking letter in my face. Said a lot of tosh about national security and delicate experiments. Basically, they were taking Luke off our hands and there was nothing I or anyone else could do to stop them. They bundled him into a car and drove away in a manoeuvre so smooth I knew they had had a lot of practice. Luke was still yelling about how Area 51 contains the remains of gray aliens when the door slammed on his face.
Doctor Bronson rubs his face and looks out of the window, lost in another age and time. The azaleas are in full bloom, the robins are singing and a pair of mounted police trot down the lane. It is the perfect suburban life. I finish scribbling and shake his hand, thanking him for his time. There are no parting words, no wistful regret. The MI5 confiscated his research and forbade him from speaking to another soul not soon after he discovered the first connections between social media and the disease now called Bronson-Jakoby Syndrome, or simply digital insanity. Now he helps heal the minds of those affected in the war for virtually no fees.
The cat hisses at me from its corner as I take the good doctor''s leave.
Hong Kong, September
The city has retained much of its former glitter as one of the world''s leading financial and technological hubs. The streets are not as full though; Hong Kong was affected like all other cities of the world with a sizeable population of kromeheads. Almost half the population either died in the various riots and subsequent war or left for more isolated places like Oymyakon and Tristan de Cunha. Long Wenling considers it a blessing in disguise. Once the most expensive neighborhood in the world, Hong Kong''s abandoned houses and apartments have become giant communes where people from all over the world live, work and thrive together.
We figured something was wrong from the get go. There were five of us. Meng the half-English bastard, Ai the passionate activist, Kong the muscle and Murali, an Indian student who discovered he loved hacking into mainframes more than he did writing and submitting essays. We worked out of this small burger and fries joint in Sham Shui Po every evening, sifting through news websites, ezines, Facebook posts and confidential forums for even the tiniest tidbit that could be analyzed, compared with the data we had already collected and then published.
What motivated us to do what we did, one might ask. We risked the wrath of the HKPF and the communist agents regularly by running a game right under their noses. Well, it was different for all of us I guess. Murali and Meng for example were hooked to the thrill doing some illegal work provided, a healthier substitute to all the coke and hashish pouring through the city. Ai''s father had once been an outspoken critic of the CCP and the CCP, true to its nature, picked him up one day for
So that night we were working late. Ai had chanced upon an obscure blog on Livejournal by an anonymous person who claimed to be a former member of the Central Intelligence Agency. It described in grim detail about how patients suffering from something called cerebral stagnation were being taken to secret facilities all over America and experimented upon. Now before you look bored at the Hollywood trope of an upright citizen stumbling across disturbing secrets, let me tell you that we received an average of ten emails every day claiming to have found the Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, evidence of extra terrestrial life and nanites in dandruff shampoos. Most went to the spam folder automatically.
This was different. Kong sat in front of his laptop and analyzed the style of writing from several angles, the blogger''s knowledge of how security systems worked, black sites used by the CIA and NSA, methods of advanced interrogation and testimonies of other ex and serving personnel. Some of them turned out to be startlingly accurate when cross-referenced with our database. The group looked to me for guidance. I looked at my watch. It was 9:30 and mother was not due home for another hour, so I thought what the heck, let''s contact this interesting guy or girl.
They had a mail address at the bottom of the blog. I sent a message identifying myself as the captain of The Bloodhounds and added I was interested to know more. A mere five minutes later the inbox pinged with a new mail. It had a phone number with the US country code. Now that got me thinking. Was it a trap designed to lure hackers and vigilantes in? China has done this before, setting up dummy accounts that pretend to be journalists and government officials on the run after getting on the wrong side of the Party.
After much debate and discussion it was decided I would make the call from the Burnphone app. You know it? It was damn useful in the time before the war. The app provided you with a temporary number which self-destructed after use without you taking the trouble to purchase a new, actual burner phone after each call. The line rang for approximately three minutes before someone picked up on the other end. My heart stopped for a second.
"Hello, this is-"
"Do not speak. Time is of the essence. You may call me Perseus. I was a senior analyst at the CIA for twenty years and now I fear my conscience can no longer support the things I have seen. I will send you a complete and comprehensive dossier about the Digital Psycho Program and you will ensure the whole world gets to know about it. Do we have a deal?"
A man. Middle aged, clear-voiced and precise with his instructions. It made me feel like I was taking an order from him, not a mere request. But the fact that he was for real made my languid heart race in excitement for the first time in a long, long time. So I promised him we would send it unadulterated to all the news outlets in the world no matter how small or popular. He thanked me and hung up. Another five minutes later, a 120-pages long document dropped in the inbox.
I interrupt him here.
Absolutely correct. What we discovered that day was a literal goldmine. Paragraph after paragraph detailing a secret experiment on people suffering from a new mental illness that turned them into mindless bots ready for reeducation. Blank slates waiting to be written on. They were prone to fits of extreme violence and would kill anyone and everyone in their immediate territory once unleashed and dropped via special delivery vehicles. To turn them even more compliant, the subjects were shown bloody, aggressive videos like the ISIS beheadings and animal cruelty. Young men and women, even teenagers as young as 16 had been picked up from Wisconsin, Alabama, Texas, Manhattan and even Toronto and Montreal. More were on the way, and the budget for the program came directly from the Treasury. It was the wet dream of every conspiracy theorist come to life in one glorious moment.
My hands were shaking as I explained my plan to the other members. Murali looked skeptical and tried to dissuade me, but Ai stood by my side and argued that we would be doing those poor kids a great service. Their families probably did not even know they had vanished. In the end it was agreed that we would comply with Perseus''s wishes and make it viral.
We wrote a small prelude, stamped it with our seal and released it to the internet. Nobody was spared, including outlets that had been inaugurated a day before. Then we waited for a full week with bated breath and insides twisted to knots with worry.
The results were atomic. The Digital Psycho Program made to the headlines of newspapers in 75 countries. YouTube channels dropped whatever mundane unboxing and reaction they had scheduled and covered the leaks. Senators and congressmen were swarmed by reporters asking for a byte. Primetime debates shook the nation. Once again, questions bombarded the veil of secrecy that shrouded CIA and other intelligence agencies and concerns over taxpayers'' money being abused were raised at every meeting, every cocktail party, every borough council. It was the Stargate scandal all over again.
Forget about American wrath. We were shielded from the subsequent shitstorm by strong government support from Iran and North Korea, Russia and China. Countries which were tired of the former political colossus''s exceptionalism and arrogance. The common folk lauded us as heroes, as protectors of the Vox Populi and guardians of justice. We basked in the glory and the admiration. Murali sold part of his Ethereum holdings and bought us all a dinner at Kowloon Shangri-La. Yeah man, time was good and only seemed to grow better with each passing hour.
Night has fallen over Hong Kong. Wenling taps away at his cheap laptop while talking to me. The internet has regressed to the noughties but the occasional cyberworm can still be found slithering across systems. The Hong Kong Provisional Government has hired him to take care of the immense mechanical grid which supplies water to and ferries waste from the district of Sham Shui Po. He works with a crew, of course, but the old team of The Bloodhounds scattered when the war came to their city. Wenling still scours the Global Missing Persons Database in hope that someday, at least one of his friends would pop up from some corner of the new world.
Louisiana, October
The bayous are a primal place, rich in vegetation and teeming with life. The sunlight filters through huge cypresses to form patches of gold on the brackish water. Crocodiles blink blearily and frogs croak in shrill symphony as I clamber aboard the Rosemary, a houseboat fashioned from wood and fiberglass. The aroma of crawfish fried with potatoes in butter and roast duck wafts from the kitchenette. Roland Carter emerges with a tray clasped firmly between his gloved hands. Cooking remains his second passion. The first, snapping candid pictures of celebrities, went extinct with the celebrities.
First of all, I would like to make myself clear on one account-I was not a paparazzo. That means I did not stand around airports and gyms hoping some B-lister flashed her fleshy thighs at the camera or had a slip up with her sports bra. I was with a reputed company, yeah? Event managers hired us regularly for official photoshoots and. I was a proper knight, and my holy sword was the dazzling Sony A7R IV which serves me to this day.
But yes, sometimes the occasional dough came handy. Times were lean bro. Who was I to complain?
I already knew about the hearing before it actually happened. A source in the Associated Press sent us a tip and come Monday Mark was yammering at me to drop my coverage of the upcoming Marvel movie and haul my ass to Capitol Hill. I had not slept in two days and was sustaining myself on a steady diet of orange juice, coffee and hamburgers. I think I cussed him. But in the end Mark was the man with the money and I was saving up to move to Manhattan, so I simply pulled on my jacket, grabbed my camera and took the tube to Capitol Hill. I kid you not, the moment I stepped out I was lost in a crowd of people from all over America who had gathered here just for the hearing. Fast food stalls sold fries and flipped burgers faster than obese teens could stuff themselves, women with so much makeup they looked inhuman conversed with indie journalists and men in power suits and ties expressed their concerns over corporate interests. There were more. College students, watchdogs, tree-huggers, hippies, closet commies and those who enjoyed chaos in general. It was like a fucking carnival.
I found a spot under a tree and waited there. It was not long before a couple of police cars wailed down the road, escorting a sleek black sedan in their midst. A current passed through the crowd and they surged as one, babbling fit to rouse the dead. The police with typical foresight had erected barriers which stopped them from engulfing the car, but even the batons and loud warnings seemed to have little effect on the crowd. I remember thinking to myself, this here is a marvelous example of people scared their way of life was going to be extinguished by the government.
Morgan Zelinsky got out of the sedan and waved his skinny arms dramatically at us. The people went berserk, reassuring him of their support and hurling vile abuse at White House in the same breath. The line of reporters undulated like the folds of a snake before the cops sent it back. I hardly cared. I already had two shots of Zelinsky in the stupid posture and one of a young blonde girl reaching out to touch him as he passed like he was some new-age messiah. High drama and little substance.
Now all that remained was to record his statement after the session was over. Very few journalists were allowed inside the building, so I bought a burger and sat down chewing on it. Morning turned to noon. Some of the crowd left, others remained. I saw a girl making a placard about free internet or something and I took her snap. Man it was getting hotter every second out there. I had a half a mind to pack up and leave.
But two hours later, Zelinsky shot out of the Capitol like a shotgun blast and a tide of reporters spilled out after him like entrails from a wound. He looked damn angry, like someone had abused his mama on live TV. He beckoned one of the suited assistants who followed him around like a shadow and whispered something in his ear, then raised his arms and began walking towards the curious crowd. Galvanized, they started cheering again.
See, most good cops and photographers have this intuition. We know when something major is about to go down. I left my comfy spot in the shade and moved as close as I could to the semicircle which was forming around Zelinsky. He looked like he was about to burst, red in the face and eyes wide and hot. Here was a man who had formed the largest social media network during his freshman year at Yale and slyly cheated the co-founders out of a fortune that numbered some $430 billion. Governments in almost every country had a working relation with him. Therefore it was only natural that when he took a decision, the earth trembled ever so slightly.
You can find some rough-cut shot with a smartphone quality video on Dailymotion even today if you search hard enough, but I was there and I heard every word that man said. The government of the United States of America, Zelinsky claimed, had decided to place several restrictions on Facebook and also try him next month for apparently overlooking the harmful, graphic content on the platform that had caused the Digital Psycho outbreaks in three continents. It was a ruse, he yelled, to enslave us and muzzle our opinions. The liberal, immigrant-loving, self-loathing Democrats wanted to tamper with our sense of perception and steer us towards a ditch of their own making. We were sheep to them. But he would never let them take away Facebook.
It was at this moment that he knew he had taken a large bite out of the political sandwich of rotten meat and stale veggies. There was an instant uproar and the cops came under dire risk of being swallowed whole and spat out. I was jostled this way and that by people frothing at the mouth as Zelinsky whipped them to a frenzy of stolen rights and muzzled speech. Nothing gets American panties in a twist faster than even a hint of threat to their rights eh?
Zelinsky knew-I saw it in his face-that he had public support. I have no idea what happened to him, whether it was ego boiling over or the necessity to announce something grand and melodramatic, but he climbed onto the roof of his car and shouted the words that would haunt everyone for a long time come.
"From today, hate speech is also free speech! We shall no longer categorize minority groups and causes as forbidden ground no matter how harsh, bellicose or radical their words! All shall have a say in this new world! And the new world, begins right now!"
There was a moment of calm. A brief ugly moment when I could hear each individual heartbeat distinctly. Then someone punched a cop and a baton came down over another man''s head. A child shrieked. A woman produced a can of pepper spray and waved it indiscriminately. An unattended poodle barked at me and I shooed it away with a kick. In less than five minutes, the whole of Capitol Hill had erupted in bloody riots. My last view of Zelinsky was the somewhat dazed man being pulled down by his dour bodyguards and shoved inside the sedan. I think I managed to click a hasty one to capture the moment.
The food is delicious. I ask for a second helping and Roland spoons another crawfish on my plate. The infamous declaration by Morgan Zelinsky, founder and CEO of Facebook, changed the political realities of the world drastically and overnight. Designated terrorist groups could now post their content freely on popular social media platforms owned and managed by Facebook. A large target audience was no longer safe from hate speech and rhetoric. It was like putting an official stamp on mass radicalization, the dire consequences of which the world faced in the next few months.